Press release

Lua, a programming language developed in Brazil, is being used in Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, two famous computer games from LucasArts Entertainment. Lua was designed and implemented at Tecgraf, a laboratory of the Department of Computer Science of PUC-Rio in Brazil, and is freely available.

Lua was developed to extend applications written in heavier, mainstream languages, such as C and C++, so that these applications can be scripted by non-programmers. In the case of computer games -- an increasing niche for Lua -- scripts are written in Lua to move the characters around and to program how they interact with the player. The actual movement and interaction is written in C or C++, but how and when they happen is determined by a Lua script. This gives a lot of flexibility to both games programmers and users.

The authors of Lua have been invited to join Yindo, a start-up company in Silicon Valley, as consultants. Management at Yindo considers that having the authors of Lua as consultants makes a big difference when the time comes to find prospective investors. Yindo is building a product to compete with Flash, and Lua is the basis of this product.

Lua is also being used in several projects around the world. These and several other applications are discussed in an active mailing list that has around 250 subscribers from all over the world.

For further information, please contact

Renata Arruda Ratton
Assessora de Comunicação, Escritório de Desenvolvimento, Centro Técnico-Científico, PUC-Rio
Phone: +55 21 274-8822, +55 21 274-4940
E-mail: com@dctc.puc-rio.br